"Countries are obliged to
protect and preserve the marine environment" requires the
important International Convention on the Law of the Sea, of 1982.
Strict compliance would be a substantial contribution to the
preservation of weather and climate. Instead, the debate on climate
change is about anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) into
the atmosphere, which is claimed to cause significant heating of the
atmosphere and thus will have lasting effects on weather and climate.
The focus in the current debate is on the increase in CO2 and air
temperatures and the extent of which it is due to human contribution.
That is by far a too narrow minded view!

• Yes, man can change the climate!

The
majority of the scientific community has indorsed this view. The
leading international institution for the assessment of climate change,
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed the
position explicitly in its most recent report of 2007:

“The warming of the climate system is
unequivocal. The vast majority of the observed increase in globally
averaged temperatures since the mid-20th Century is very likely caused
by anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations " (IPCC 2007).

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is listed as
the most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas. The effect is called
"anthropogenic global warming" (AGW). This view was already
expressed in the first IPCC report in 1990 and has been established in
global politics for a long time.

Fig. A3-1

Fig. A3-2

• No, man cannot change the climate!

This
is the view of a minority group of scientists and other persons
participating in the discussion. They are often called ‘Skeptics’
or climate deniers, because they do not always share the anthropogenic
aspect, in part or entirely. A book title brings this thought to the
point: "Nature, Not Human Activity, determines the climate."
(Singer, et al., 2008)The book explains the view along the following conditions:

__"The increase of carbon dioxide
is not responsible for the current warming."

__”Political action, in the name of
the 'fight against global warming' is taken and required,
unnecessarily."

__"The main causes of warming and
cooling phases, extending over decades, can be derived from solar
activity."

The book recommends accepting
nature as it is instead of investing large sums of money in the
reduction of CO2 emissions.

And what is the role of the sun?
Her impact is immense. The earthly system would not work without the
sun. Any change of solar activity is reflected in the air
temperatures, not necessarily synonym, but always traceable with a
moderate margin, presumably never big enough to initiate a climatic
shift over many millions of years. The Earth's weather/climate system
consists of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and geosphere
(UNFCCC, Art.1, par.3), influenced by conditions within the water
volume and processed in each sphere. The medium that sustains and
controls the atmospheric temperatures are the oceans and seas. They
determine the region, timing and magnitude of water vapor and
temperature variability. The sun is the fuel of the climatic system,
but the driver is the ocean, and, with an average temperature of
merely 4° Celsius, the major
source of serious climate changes[1].
Oceans make climate!

• My view is: The use of the ocean by
man is a potential threat to the climate.

Both positions have serious flaws
for not caring about the anthropogenic impact in the marine
environment, which has the greatest impact on the stability of weather
and climate.

For me personally, the assessment
of climate change is a matter of the oceans. After childhood years on
a
North Sea
island, a long working life as a seaman, decks officer and captain on
cargo ships, I regard the oceans as the determining factor in weather
and climate. The discussion about climate change and any anthropogenic
contribution must endorse and be based on this understanding. In 1988,
my book on the international Law of the Sea of ​​1982 was
published in
England
. This Convention should be not only assessed a global constitution,
but also as the best tool to understand and protect the oceans.
Article 192 of Part XII concerning the marine environment stipulates:

"States
have the obligation to protect and preserve the marine environment."

This obligation is of great
importance for the atmosphere, weather and climate, because if mankind
understands and protects the oceans, it will minimize the threat posed
by anthropogenic climate change. If man fails on ocean matters, or
understands too little, or too late, errors cannot be corrected.
Man-made changes to the marine ecosystem, which have an effect on the
weather system, cannot be controlled by man, even if science believes
it is possible with the "greenhouse effect" by reducing CO2
emissions. 1992, at the beginning of the climate debate, I expressed
my opinion already in a letter to the scientific journal NATURE,
titled “Climate Change”:

"The
climate is the continuation of oceans by other means".(Nature, Vol. 360, 1992, p. 292)

Since
the
mid-19th Century, people began to use the oceans in a much
more intensive way. Shipping and fishing abandoned sails, but
navigated instead with motor engines and ship propellers.
Correspondingly, over the last 150 years the Earth has warmed by about
0.7°C, with only two climatic shifts during the entire period. 90
years ago a 20-year warming cycle began, and then the earth cooled
since the first war winter 1939/40 for about three decades. Both
periods stand in close correlation with the two World Wars. Have human
activities in the marine environment anything to do with the change in
regional and global temperature, without ever being noticed or
investigated?

b.Where
do we stand today?

As
the first
report of the International Panel on Climate Change IPCC (1990, p. 76)
already wrote that the sea has an essential role in the climate system,
it seems all what needed to be said, had been said. This notion was
confirmed in the latest report, but again with one sentence only:
"The oceans play an important role in climate variability and
climate change (IPCC, 2007, page 389) This is well said and thoroughly
correct, but in no way reflected in climate research. Science is still

staring up into the air trying to
explain the danger of climatic changes primarily as an atmospheric
matter. The attention given to the role of the ocean is still by far
too little.

However
the vast majority of scientists and politicians that deal with the
climate issue are convinced that the problem lies in anthropogenic
increased carbon dioxide emissions. This debate reached politics in 1988, when
a NASA scientist, James Hansen,
claimed in a hearing before the U.S. Congress that global warming is
inevitable due to increased CO2 emissions. Al
Gore supported the view in his book "Earth in the Balance -
Forging a New Common Purpose", in 1992, a few months prior to
taking office, as Vice President of the
United States
. Meanwhile, Al Gore was awarded an Oscar for his film "An Inconvenient
Truth" and, together with the IPCC, the Nobel Peace Prize in
2009. The extreme narrowness of this thesis, and the resulting
policies from this view, could one

day prove to be the real threat to
mankind. Already huge investments are planned, or initiated, with a
high potential of being completely wrong.

According to UNFCCC estimates
in 2007, costs of adaptation to climate change would amount to
$49–171 Billion per annum globally by 2030[2].
The news magazine “Der Spiegel” explained the demands in a report on
Feb. 21st 2007[3]
as follows:

·"Only massive investment and a radical change
of policy may yet avert the climate collapse. By 2020, the corner must
be turned – that is according to information from SPIEGEL ONLINE,
the alarming analysis of the IPCC. The UN experts say, what should be
done.

·It is
about $ 16 trillion – yes you have read correctly.
16,000,000,000,000 dollars are to be set up in 2030 primarily in
low-CO2 technologies, researchers at the IPCC estimated this huge sum
as costs for a full stop which can still save humanity from climate
collapse."

For those who have no idea of what
this means, they should note that the economic cost of the entire WWII
have been estimated with a sum of U.S. $ 1,600,000,000,000, which is
90% less than the IPCC suggestion. This approach is breath taking, and
extremely irresponsible. CO2 is, if at all, only a small player in the
climatic system.

c. What should we look at? Anthropogenic ocean use!

Any anthropogenic climatic change
concern needs to consider human intervention in the marine environment.
Alterations here have the potential to influence the dynamics of the
atmosphere. Ever since numerous unexpected weather and climate
phenomena occurred in close timely correlation with the First and
Second World War a shock should have gone through the scientific
community.

Figure A3-4

The aim should have been to
understand the impact of human activities at sea and in the marine
environment, as there are for example shipping, naval maneuvers,
fishing, yachts, oil rigs and offshore wind farms. The investigation
should not be limited to the current situation, but should cover the
development during the last 150 years. The middle of the 19th
Century marks two events, which have influenced weather and climate,
ever since: The end of the Little Ice Age and the transition from sail
to motor driven ships. Both events have contributed to global
warming during the last 150 years. Shipping and any other activity at
sea could have been major factors in ocean warming processes (see: Robert E. Stevenson; Fn.1).

Sea
transport by propeller driven vessels is a very effective method to
influence the sea surface structure over several meters depths. With
the increase of ship traffic, the number of ships, and the size of
ships, the influence has grown considerably over the years.

__aa) Currently, the world
merchant fleet of some 40,000 ships (ships of 1,000 tons and more),
Figure A3-4. Vessels over 1,000 tons displacement have a draft between
3 to 15 meters and a speed of about 12 to 25 nautical miles per hour
(22 to 45 km/h). Per day they travel a distance between 500 to 1,000
kilometers. An account of all motor and propeller-equipped boats and
ships

Figure A3-5; see also 167: “Climate
is all about water!”

with a draft of at least one meter
would result in several million units - an armada that could ‘churn
and mix’ the sea surface layer of the
North Atlantic
probably more than once in a year.
__bb) Before propeller driven vessels sailed the seas, there was only
one external force that could cause a “mixing effect": the
wind. The stronger the wind force the more mixing within the upper sea
surface layer occurs. In very stormy conditions, the direct influence
of the wind goes down to a maximum depth of 50 meters. The constantly
enlarging ship and boat fleet over the last 150 years has a similar
effect on the marine environment as the wind. Both change according to
their intensity the temperature and salinity structure in the upper
sea surface layer.

The physical state of the oceans
can be roughly divided into the deep sea (below 1,000 m, very stable),
the thermocline (200-1,000 m), and the mixed layer (upper 200 m). The
upper part of the mixed layer is the sphere where external forces have
a direct impact on the ocean, the sun, the wind and boat propellers as
well as naval warfare or maneuvers.
The
heat energy of sunlight is mainly absorbed in the first few
centimetres of the sea surface. Wind, waves and vessels mix the water
near the surface layer and distribute heat to deeper water, which is
generally an ‘internal’ ocean affair.
Internal forcing is mainly caused by differences in density due to
temperature and salinity variation. The process is highly complex and
is beyond the scope of this work - so here are just some hints:

Figure A3-6

Every day ships and boats move
tens of millions of miles through a medium with highly complex
physical conditions. A modern container ship covers the 6,000
kilometer distance between
Rotterdam
and
New York
in less than a week. Ships sail the seas by day and night, in summer
and in winter, whether the sea is smooth or rough. Ships mix the
surface layer at any time when they are at sea.

The wind needs to blow at least
moderately before it forms waves and influences the internal
conditions of the surface layer. In winter ship wake exchanges colder
surface water with warmer from lower levels, in summer it goes
conversely. The list of potential consequences is probably endless,
and a detailed description and analysis difficult, mainly because the
science of the atmosphere, i.e. CO2, has little to say about the
impact of shipping and other similar human activities on the ocean. It
is even difficult to find any theses in this respect. Did science fail to examine and explain
fundamental questions concerning the functioning of the climate?

If meteorology and climatology had
a thorough understanding of the impact of shipping and other ocean
uses on the atmosphere, it would presumably have enabled them to
explain the surprising weather excesses during the two world wars.
Unfortunately, in none of the two fields science offers anything
substantial. While analyzing a link between shipping and global air
temperature over a time span of 150 years is too big an issue for me,
the war periods are not. The sudden increase of activities at sea,
offers a unique opportunity to demonstrate how effective man can
influence and change atmospheric processes.

d.Two
world wars - two climatic changes

The thematic restriction to two
very short periods - as already explained – is not the best solution,
but it is sufficient enough to prove a direct influence of humans on
weather. The numerous events portrayed in this work show that the
oceans 'make the weather'. The two naval wars, 1914-1918 and
1939-1945, stand for a massive intervention in the marine environment.
If one ignores the madness of these events, it is useful to regard the
naval warfare as a large scale field experiment concerning weather and
climate. At the end of WWI an increase of warming started in the
Atlantic section of the
Arctic
for two decades. With WWII a global cooling commenced in
Europe
that lasted for three decades. However, the field experiment proves to
be most helpful concerning the three preliminary war winters 1939/40,
1940/41, and 1941/42. From a prewar situation of which A.J.
Drummond said, that:

"This century has been
characterized to show a widespread tendency to mild winters that it
was thought that the 'old-fashioned winters', of which we have heard
so many, are gone forever";

Butthereishope!

A recent paper by Gilbert
P. Compo and Prashant D. Sardeshmukh, entitled: “Oceanic
influence on recent continental warming”, raises the oceanic
issue in a different way than this investigation, but the fact
matters. For the interested reader two brief excerpts:

Abstract : Evidence is presented that the
recent worldwide land warming has occurred largely in response
to a worldwide warming of the oceans rather than as a direct
response to increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) over land.
Atmospheric model simulations of the last half-century with
prescribed observed ocean temperature changes, but without
prescribed GHG changes, account for most of the land warming.
The oceanic influence has occurred through
hydrodynamic-radiative teleconnections, primarily by moistening
and warming the air over land and increasing the downward
longwave radiation at the surface. The oceans may themselves
have warmed from a combination of natural and anthropogenic
influences.

Concludingsentence:

The indirect and substantial role of the oceans in causing the recent
continental warming emphasizes the need to generate reliable
projections of ocean temperature changes over the next century,
in order to generate more reliable projections of not just the
global mean temperature and precipitation changes (Barsugli et
al. 2006), but also regional climate changes.

The investigation benefits from
the fact that the bulk of naval activities during the first 30 months
took place mainly in northern European seas. In the sea areas north of
the
Bay of Biscay
sunlight is limited during the winter months. Any mild winter air
temperature for Northern Europe must come either from the Atlantic or
the
North Sea
and Baltic. In more southern regions it would be far more difficult to
define the anthropogenic influence against the sun's heat. For this
reason, the
Mediterranean
, which still gets a lot of sunshine during the winter season, and
where considerable naval warfare took place as well, is not considered
in this study. The investigation benefits also from the fact that the
war started at the end of the summer season when the storage of heat
in the sea areas in
Northern Europe
is completed, and the process reversed. The stored heat is released
into the atmosphere.

The three war winters of 1940,
1941 and 1942 in central and northern
Europe
are thus the focus of this investigation covering more than two-thirds
of this book. However top attention is given to the first war winter
1939/40 (Chapter C, pp. 43-104) for at least three reasons:

• It was the coldest winter in
Central Europe (including
Berlin
,
Prague
,
Warsaw
), in over 110 years.
• The outbreak of winter was totally unexpected and surprising.
• War and naval activities interfered with the "natural course
of things", i.e., any comparison starts at the baseline (statistical
average). A few months later, it must be assumed that the war has
already brought alterations to both, the atmosphere and the sea.

A3-7; Yndestad,
H., Turrell, W.R. and Ozhigin, V. (2008).

But other important events that
are closely related to the two world wars are presented and discussed
as well, as it will underline the sensitivity of ocean matters to
human activities. Emphasis is particularly on the following events:

___The abrupt climate change at the end of the First World
War, which led to a warming of the winter in the northern hemisphere,
a warm period that lasted until 1940.

___The global cooling that began
simultaneously with the Second World War and stands in close
association to two events:

------ with the naval war in the
Atlantic
(1940-44),
------with the naval war in the western Pacific (1942-45).

Despite the confidence to prove a considerable contribution of naval
war to the three extreme winters, regarding the long term climatic
events the expectation should not include further evidence. Available
material is not sufficient enough here for full scientific proof,
despite of many surprising correlations and connections. Nevertheless,
I estimate the relevant anthropogenic contribution as:

(a)relevant,
meaning a contribution between 1% - 5%, respectively as:

(b)significant,
meaning a contribution of more than 5%).

In my opinion man contributed to to the two long term events at
least as follows:

•
Concerning the sudden warming in the
Arctic
(starting in winter of 1918/19, ending in winter
of 1939/40) the war at sea was:

In
order to clarify the interconnection between the three war winters
1940-1942 and the long-term events, it is necessary to establish the
fact that the naval war contributed to the severity of the war
winters. However, if there is sufficient proof in this respect, there
would be no excuse for not considering the impact of naval war on
long-term climatic changes. It would be highly irresponsible to
neglect that.

As
I mentioned earlier, it is unfortunate that science is not capable of
providing a full picture of the impact of man’s activities at sea,
and thus undermines the objectives
of international agreements to protect the marine environment, which
simultaneously means: protecting the climate from changes caused by
man.

e.Comments
concerning the terms "weather" and "climate"

The book will use the terms "weather"
and "climate" as they are currently used in science, but wants to make it utterly clear that it is done
with considerable outrage[4].
The scientific community is not able or willing to provide proper
definitions, but is merely using the layman’s explanation: climate
is ‘average weather’. This definition “must
surely be regarded as quite inadequate” was the verdict of H.H.
Lamp,founder
ofthe Climatic
Research Unit in 1972 in the School of
Environmental Sciences at the University of
East Anglia, back in 1969 (Lamp, 1969).

• Article 1, Section 2: "Climate
change" means the change of climate which is attributed directly
or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the
atmosphere, and observed over comparable time periods are added:
natural climate fluctuations.”
• Article 1, Section 3: "Climate system" means the
totality of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and geosphere and
their interactions.”

It
is pure nonsense when it is said that: “Climate change means the change
of climat….”. It is in no way better when the definition of the
‘climate system’ (sec. 3) does not say anything more than: the
interaction of nature. Why use “climate system”, if the same
explanation would fit to a term ‘weather system’ as well, for
example: “Weather system“ means
the totality of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and geosphere
and their interactions”. One should note that the most important factor,
the sun, is not mentioned at all. Furthermore the hydrosphere
describes the combined mass of water found on, under, and above the
surface of a planet, which is not necessarily helpful when the
question is to understand what climate is all about:

"Climate is the continuation of oceans by other means",which means, in particular, the heat and water supply to the atmosphere.

e. Further remarks

The book is about the impact of
human activities on the marine environment that evidently, or most
likely, has had an impact on weather and climate. All other facts and
information of relevance, particularly naval history, and text book
information and knowledge are only referred to as far as it

may serve the purpose of this
investigation. They have been chosen with care, but were not
necessarily cross checked, and presented in a way to be understood by
a wide general readership. Special scientific literature, and
information, closely related to the thesis are referred to with
standard reference, author and year, with the reference details in the
List of References (pp. 203-210). Footnotes are used when deemed
helpful that the information is immediately available, and
particularly by internet links, but not in all cases.

Figure A3-9

A3-10; The wake of a mine layer in
autumn 1939

[1]E.g. the late oceanographerRobert E. Stevenson
(1921-2001) asserted: “Yes,
the Ocean Has Warmed; No, It’s Not ‘Global Warming’; (2000)
at:http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/ocean.html;
R:E:S. has been called the „Father of space oceanography”;
http://scrippsnews.ucsd.edu/Releases/?releaseID=131